THE RISEN LORD

(a) The Centrality of Jesus Christ
For Christians the person of Jesus Christ is absolutely central to the Christian Faith. They would say that Christianity is Christ. They may differ about many things, articles of belief, ways of worship, methods of government, but for all of them Jesus Christ is central and supreme.

Now this feeling is shared in a most interesting way by a great many folk who would not call themselves Christians at all. “We have no patience,” they would say, “with your creeds and your doctrines. We have no time for your quarrels about bishops and presbyteries, we don’t have any great desire to share in your ways of worship. But Jesus of Nazareth—yes, we feel we must respect Him. There is something there that seems to claim our admiration and our reverence.
But if there is this common interest in Jesus, to call it no more, on the part of both Christians and many non-Christians, it is surely not satisfactory to leave the matter there. There are questions that a thinking man will want to hear answered. Who was this Jesus? Why does He claim the admiration of so many? Did His death mean something special to the world as Christians claim? And what about this story that He rose from the dead and is alive?

(b) Where We Begin
In the nineteen-thirties there was a book published under the title “The Failure of Winston Churchill.” What a stupid title that sounds now. The writer was so obviously dealing with an incomplete story. You have to look over Churchill’s whole life; in particular, you must take your bearings from 1940 “his finest hour” if you are to understand what Winston Churchill meant for history. This is true of any great man. There are central moments, supreme experiences that reveal the real truth about them. This was certainly true about Jesus of Nazareth. And the revealing moment of His life was the Resurrection. It may seem very strange to start talking about the meaning and importance of His life, at that very point when, in human terms, His life had come to an end, but in fact our attitude to the Resurrection is going to de­termine in the most crucial way what we think about Jesus.

We perhaps tend to look on the four Gospels as potted biographies of Jesus, incidents recorded more or less as they happened. This is not the way of it at all. The Gospels were written a good number of years after the events they spoke of, written by men who said, “All these things are written in the light of Christ’s Resurrec­tion, for it was only when Jesus rose from the dead that we could understand who He was and what He had done.” So we must begin too, at the Resurrection. Was it fact, or just fantasy? If it is fantasy, then we needn’t go any further with our questions about Jesus. He was just a man like ourselves, now dead and gone. As the Apostle Paul said, “If there was no Resurrection, then our faith is useless and impossible.” But if it is fact, then obviously our whole understanding of Jesus and our attitudes to Him are going to be very, very different.

(c) Evidence of the Resurrection
It isn’t surprising when you read the different accounts in the four Gospels that there should be minor discrepan­cies. If you were investigating a road accident and asked witnesses to give their account of it, you’d be more than surprised if their stories agreed to the last detail—you’d be sure that they had got together on it.
The central agreement in the New Testament about the Resurrection is beyond dispute. They were absolutely sure that Jesus, having died by crucifixion, rose again from the dead.

When you bring the whole record down to funda­mentals, you find there are only two basic possibilities. Either the men of the New Testament were themselves deceived or else they were deliberately deceiving others. Take the second possibility first, for it can be quickly set aside, this suggestion that the disciples somehow stole away the body of their Master and then concocted the story of the Resurrection. Why make up such a story? They got nothing out of it themselves, nothing except hard knocks, the hatred of the world, imprisonment, death. Why deceive people if this was what came of it? Why make up a story if this was the outcome?

No, this theory can be ruled out. The Resurrection was not a story made up and put about by the Apostles. They certainly themselves believed it to be true.
But what of the first suggestion then? The disciples were no doubt sincere, but were they themselves taken in? Were the appearances of the Risen Lord, as they called Him, no more than some kind of hallucination? Perhaps the disciples were thinking so much about Jesus, longing so much to see Him again, hoping so much that He would come to them again, that in fact they created for themselves a wonderful fancy that He did appear to them. The Resurrection in fact was no more than a figment of their own imagination.

It sounds plausible but it doesn’t meet the facts. It is clear from the writers themselves that far from hoping or expecting that Jesus would come to them again, they had given up all hope. They were depressed and despairing. A hallucination might be created in the mind of one man or even a few, but on one occasion at least, five hundred saw the Risen Lord, most of them there to be examined when this statement was made. And there are the sheer physical facts of the story. What about the empty tomb where the body of Jesus had been laid? And what about the body itself? Where did it finally rest?

We must remember that it was only seven weeks after the Crucifixion that the disciples—completely changed in themselves, radiant and courageous—were out on the streets of Jerusalem, shouting out the news of the Resurrection. Surely if it was all due to a hallucina­tion the Jewish authorities would have quickly put an end to the nonsense by producing the dead body. But they didn’t, for they couldn’t. The tomb was empty. The body was gone.

Historical evidence for the Resurrection is extremely strong. It is a miracle, of course, and for some this is enough—miracles don’t happen. To anyone with an open mind this is too glib a way of escape. Obviously we can’t prove with material certainty the truth of a miracle any more than we can prove the existence of God. The one, like the other, depends finally on the verdict of personal experience. But the historical evidence is so strong that Christians have the right to ask men who are prepared to think, to look at the facts honestly.

For the Christians, the study of who Jesus was and what His life and work mean to the world, hinges on this fact that on the third day He rose again from the dead. And these facts must not be limited to the first Easter Day. Indeed not even for the first disciples was this true. It was not simply that these disciples believed to the end of their lives that they had seen Jesus alive after His crucifixion. It was much more.  We have to take into account the change in these men from being broken, frustrated and despairing, into a body of fervent evangelists who went out to change the world. We have to consider that in every age that same transforming power has been evident in the lives of men. And it has been associated, not with the memory of one who dies in the long ago, but with one whose life-changing fellowship can be known still. All these things are facts and they are part of the evidence for a Christ who is risen and alive.

(d) Looking Back from the Empty Tomb
Now it is from the standpoint of the Resurrection that we must ask our questions about Jesus. It was at this point that the first Christians really entered into an understanding of their Lord. Many things that had previously puzzled them were now made clear. Thoughts that had seemed too impossible to be considered were now seen to be no more than the truth. They remembered very clearly the feelings that had been aroused as they lived and worked with Jesus across the years — feelings beyond interpretation until the Resurrection. He was a village carpenter, poor, untaught, and yet when He called them to leave their homes and their work, they had obeyed without question—wondering why they did.

They had listened to His teaching—there was an authority in what He said that made them feel it was God speaking and not just a man like themselves.
He had performed wonderful acts of healing and they themselves, with multitudes more, had been astonished and amazed.

They had been privileged to live in close company with Him for many months, and that intimacy had been the most wonderful and the most disturbing thing of all. In His company, life reached new heights they had never known and yet at the same time they saw themselves more clearly than ever they had done before. He was able to do for them what they had thought only God could do—to assure them of forgiveness, to bring a sense of peace into situations that were often disturbing and alarming, to inspire them to become bigger and better men. He had brought God to them and them to God.

But so far as Jesus Himself was concerned, the close intimacy that so often brings a man down in estimation, reveals his faults and failings very clearly, did for Him the very opposite. The better they knew Him the more they revered Him, the closer their intimacy the greater their regard, for they could find no fault in Him at all, but a purity and strength of character that both humbled and amazed them.
Often they had been perplexed. What kind of man was this who had called them? They had thought about it constantly, they had talked together often about it. They were convinced, of course, that He was a man sent from God, but there were moments when this was seen clearly to be not enough. “He must be the Messiah” they said, that is the Promised One, the One whom all Israel expected to come, through whom Israel’s destiny in the purpose of God was to be realised.

But always there were doubts. The religious leaders who ought to have known best would have none of Him. He was from Galilee, a carpenter, not a likely Messiah. They said He was lax about the law of Moses, that He kept the wrong kind of company, and seemed to care most for the wrong kind of people. The Crucifixion was the end, so far as the disciples were concerned. A Messiah on a Cross was a contradiction in terms. He was a good man for whom things had gone terribly wrong. Their dreams had been fantasies, their hopes for Him were to be unfulfilled.

So the disciples had felt on the evening of Good Friday, but obviously now with the Resurrection, they had to think again. It was the most sceptical of the disciples who, on the first Sunday after Easter, fell at Christ’s feet and cried “My Lord and my God.” He was that for them now-­Lord and God—proved to be so by the  Resurrection. Now looking back over the remembrance of his life among them, they began to understand not only who Jesus was, but what He had done, and why. It is from this standpoint that we too look back across the life and work of our Lord. His birth, His ministry, I-us death, these we can only begin to understand once we have realised that Jesus was Lord and God, declared to be so, as Paul writes, by the fact that He rose from the dead.

II. THE INCARNATE LORD
Every Christmas we sing carols, sing them cheerfully and perhaps with not too much thought, though they contain the most stupendous statements.
“Veiled in flesh the Godhead see.”
“Though true God of true God, Light of Light eternal,
The womb of a virgin He hath not abhorred.” We are saying that in some sense God was present in Jesus of Nazareth, or to put it the other way, that in a unique way Jesus of Nazareth was divine. We are re­peating the wonderful discovery of the disciples on the first Easter, or rather God’s revelation to them that Jesus was Lord and God.

(a)           His True Humanity
Now this must not in any way be set against the fact that Jesus was a man, truly, genuinely, a man.
Our way of thinking may not make us liable to this error, as certain periods of history have done. There have been times when people were ready to believe that Jesus was God merely assuming the disguise of a man; in much the same way as the old pagan gods Jupiter and Mercury used periodically to visit the earth, disguised as shepherds or travellers. Jesus was no camouflaged deity, no visitor from space masquerading as a human. He was a man, truly, genuinely, one of us. The men of the New Testament were never in any doubt about this, even looking back from the Resurrection.

They had lived with Him and they knew He was as truly man as they were. They had known hunger and thirst and weariness together. They knew His background—born in an out-house, brought up in a peasant’s home, trained to be a carpenter. They knew that He suffered temptation as they themselves did. They had seen Him moved to the depths by the suffering of His fellows, He had wept by the grave of a friend, In the last days in Jerusalem they had seen His manhood revealed in its towering strength, in its utter weakness. Courage, steadfastness, endurance, had marked every step of His road to Calvary.

But bodily weakness made Him collapse under the weight of the Cross, a very human sense of desolation made Him cry out, “My Cod, why have you forsaken me?” His disciples never doubted, even as they looked back from the empty tomb, never doubted that He was truly man.  Nor must we, for the fact of Christ’s genuine and abiding manhood has implications that are deep and far-reaching.
Jesus is revealed as sharing fully in our own life. No pretending or masquerading, not choosing a sheltered or comfortable area of life in which to live out 1-us earthly days, but sharing the common lot of ordinary folk and thereby giving it a new significance.

His enemies in His own time mocked His working class background—”Isn’t this the carpenter?” they said. Opponents since then have sneered many a time at a Saviour who was a working man. But we glory in this; not ashamed or embarrassed, but glad always to remember that our simplest way of life He shared, that our meanest forms of work He made worth while. The dignity of labour and the need for conscientious work, the value of every simple task in the eyes of God, all this we must learn as we look at the Carpenter of Nazareth who was God Incarnate.

The whole world in which we do our work has a new significance too when we look at it from this point of view. The world into which the Son of God came was created by God in the beginning and is now asserted once more to be His. Not left to the evil powers that do so much harm within it, but God’s world, made and re­deemed by His love. So we live in God’s world and we must not take up any escapist attitude towards it, contracting out, separating faith from ordinary livings. Life in the world need never be vain or empty. We should be doing its work responsibly and enjoying its wholesome joys sincerely, and fulfilling our part in home and community. God did not think the world too mean for His coming and we must see it always as His world.

There is this also. Jesus was not only true man, He was the truest man who ever lived. He is not only, as we shall see, the revelation of what God is like, He is God’s revelation of what man should be like. We speak of Him as sinless, but this is not to be understood in a negative way. Positively He was all that man should be, man as God meant him to be. We are sinful folk, all of us. In even the best there are faults and flaws, so that none of us could express fully what God’s purpose was when He made man. But in Jesus there was nothing to spoil the divine intention, nothing to blur the image of God. Here was man in his true greatness, man as he was meant to be.

So Jesus is for ever the supreme pattern of human life, challenging us, inspiring us. When a man lives with complete trust in God, drawing fully on the reserves of God, this is the ideal he realises and it is towards this that we must always be striving, what Paul called “nothing less than the full stature of Christ. One thing more we must stress about the true man­hood of Jesus. The Apostles were sure that the Christ who returned to them after the Resurrection was “this same Jesus.” We have seen that He was not the less divine because He was human. We must also see that after the Resurrection and His return into the spiritual and eternal world, He was no less human because He was divine.

We tend perhaps, if we try to think of Jesus after His Resurrection and Ascension, to assume that He dis­carded His human nature with the physical body, that His humanity ended with His days on the earth. But this is not what Scripture teaches, nor has the Christian Church ever accepted this.

In the Incarnation Jesus became man. He took on Him our whole nature. And He is still the same Jesus. Divine, but also and always human. This is a very precious truth for it means that the Christ who lives and reigns in the glory of the eternal world is our Brother, sharing our nature, possessed of our humanity.

(b)           The Virgin Birth
The Christmas carols from which we quoted spoke of Jesus as being born of a virgin. What are we to make of this? For hundreds of years Christian people have repeated the words of the Apostles Creed—born of the virgin Mary—in modern times this doctrine has been brought increasingly into question. “How could it be?” men have asked, “Why should it be that Jesus of Nazareth came into existence from the direct action of God upon the peasant girl Mary, why not accept Him as the child of Mary and Joseph in the normal way?”

Objections to the belief in the Virgin Birth are brought from many different directions. For some it is a miracle and therefore ruled out immediately. But of course as we have seen, the whole Gospel is based upon miracle, and a special act of divine intervention to effect the birth of Jesus would be one part of the great intervention represented by the whole Gospel story. Some would point out pagan parallels to the story of the Virgin Birth. “Mythology,” they would say, “is full of strange births brought about by the intercourse of gods and humans.” But these stories are fundamentally different from the Gospel records; they speak not of  births out of virginity, but of the very opposite. Further­more, no Jew had anything but abhorrence for the immoralities of pagan mythology and would certainly never have borrowed from them.

There has been a tendency to dismiss the Virgin Birth as not given sufficient evidence in the New Testament. Only a few verses in Luke and Matthew have reference to the miraculous conception. Elsewhere there is either silence or the implication that Jesus was Joseph’s son. The argument from silence is always a dangerous one. Certainly neither Paul nor any of the New Testament writers bases any theological arguments upon the Virgin Birth, but this is not to say that they did not accept it.

It is interesting to remember that for the two years Paul was in prison in Caesarea, Luke was with him, free to spend time gathering material for his Gospel, like the careful writer he was. He gives the fullest account of the Virgin Birth. Many scholars believe that Luke was using a Hebrew source which must have come from the family circle of our Lord. After all, what evidence could be given about the Virgin Birth and by whom? Ultimately only Mary’s own testimony would be admitted. but such a matter obviously would not be disclosed except to a very small and intimate circle. References to it are surely not to be looked for on the same scale as references to the public events of our Lord’s life.

The main objection perhaps in modern times comes in these terms. “if Jesus were not born as we are, then He is not truly one of us. The Incarnation must be complete. He must be born as we are. Now, of course, He was born as we are. if psychologists are right these days in saying that the experience of birth is a factor in the make-up of our personalities, then Jesus shared this experience with us. His birth was a normal human birth. It is His conception, say Matthew and Luke, that was supernatural.

The answer to these objections will be for some the simple fact that the Virgin Birth has its place in the Gospel records. Many more will be content, as the Church in general has been from the beginning, to believe that it was in harmony with the unique nature and work of Jesus that He should enter the world in a unique way, a way which shows very clearly that the coming of Jesus was due to the direct intervention of God in human history.
Let us remember that faith in the divinity of Jesus does not in any sense depend upon or follow after accept­ance of the Virgin Birth. Quite the reverse.

We are looking back from the Resurrection, It is because we have seen the Risen Christ, Lord and God, that we find the manner of His coming into the world fitting and acceptable. We have spoken of the Incarnation as the direct intervention of God in history, we have spoken of the Son of God as coming into the world. One of the creeds talks of “the only-begotten Son of God who, for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven and was made man.” This is obviously the language of symbolism, including the symbolism of space, but behind the language is a vital truth.

We mustn’t forget that we are sharing the viewpoint of those who looked back from the Resurrection. They realised that in a unique way God was in Christ. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, but God is eternal. They were forced then, not by speculation but by the experiences they had known, forced to think in terms of an Eternal Being incarnate in Jesus. After Pentecost they came to think of Him as the Second Person in a Trinity that is uniquely one.

This Eternal Being, the everlasting Son of God, by the immediate action of God was made man in Jesus of Nazareth. This doesn’t mean, of course, that the human personality of Jesus existed before Bethlehem, or that there was any continuity of life and memory between Jesus of Nazareth and the eternal Son of God. What we are trying to say through the difficulties of language and the limits of human understanding is this. It was God, the eternal Son of God, the Second Person in the Trinity who was incarnate in Jesus.

This is the tremendous truth that inspires some of the noblest phrases in the New Testament. John says, “God loved the world so much that He gave His only Son.” Paul writes, “The divine nature was His from the first. Yet . . . bearing the human likeness, revealed in human shape, He humbled Himself.” But even noble phrases have their limits. The simple short words of these same two writers are even more striking and more moving. “The Word became flesh.” “God was in Christ.”

Of course there is no end to the questions we might ask about the union of the divine and the human in Jesus— how two such natures could exist together in one personality. Let us be clear that this doctrine is not the result of airy-fairy speculation. It is a conviction that came first out of the experience of the first Apostles. It has been shared by all who have come to know Christ across the years. He has been found to be both truly human and truly divine, both man and God. With all its difficulties of understanding, this conviction has been held fast by the Christian Church, because it is the only answer that fits the facts.

(c) How did Jesus come to know that He was the Son of God?
We cannot hold that Jesus knew Himself to be the Son of God from His infancy. The thought would have been impossible for a child’s mind. Nor should we think of this revelation being given to Jesus in one single moment of time. The impact  would have been too shattering for a truly human mind to take without collapsing. Surely, rather, we must accept that slowly and gradually as Jesus grew from childhood to manhood, there came to Him the realisation that He had a relationship with God which was different from that of other men, that He was in the world with a quite unique purpose to fulfil for God and men.

We may think it then a remarkable fact that so little is recorded in the Gospels about the first thirty years of our Lord’s life, including what in any child’s life we call the formative years. How important they must have been for Jesus! Hints there are throughout the Gospels which tell us something of the background to our Lord’s life, home, family, upbringing. The direct information we have about Jesus Himself in these years before His work in the wider world began, must have come from the lips of Jesus Himself and is therefore the more signifi­cant. It deals with three events only, His visit to Jerusalem at twelve years of age, His baptism by John, His temptation in the wilderness. Let us look at the first two of these now. They give suggestions of an answer to the question we have asked—how did Jesus come to know that He was the Son of God?

At the age of twelve, Jesus went up to Jerusalem with His family to share in the Feast of the Passover. It was a significant visit for Him. At that age a Jewish boy became a “Son of the Law” and entered upon the duties and privileges of a full member of his race and religion. So Jesus went up to Jerusalem, joining with Joseph and Mary the caravan of pilgrims journeying south to the capital city. We can imagine the enthusiasm and emotion in the heart of the boy Jesus. There had been growing within Him a sense of dependence upon God, of nearness to God, of special relationship to God. Now He was going up to Jerusalem to pledge Himself to that same God.

 The solemn week in Jerusalem must have been a week of tremendous value to the wondering boy. So much so that when the caravan assembled for the return journey and set out for the north, Jesus was left behind in the city, unconscious of time, absorbed in the ritual of the Temple. Joseph and Mary found Him there, when they came back looking for Him. “Your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety,” said Mary.

“Did you not know,” answered Jesus, “that I was bound to be in my Father’s house?” There is a fascinating contrast between Mary’s word—”your father,” and our Lord’s reply—”my Father.” Perhaps we should not read too much into this, though it might be argued that even at this stage Jesus was graciously but definitely pointing out His deepest and truest relationship was not with Joseph but with God. It may not be that the child of twelve had full consciousness of His unique relationship with God, but the story illustrates the process of develop­ment out of which that full consciousness came.

Eighteen years or more passed by. Jesus lived in the home at Nazareth, worked as a carpenter, shared to the full the life of ordinary folk. Throughout the years the conviction had been deepening that He was the Son of God, in the world to do a unique work for God. It would almost seem that He was waiting for a signal from God to begin that work, a clear word from God that the time had come. That signal and that word came with the ministry of John the Baptist.

The work of John—like a modern Elijah in his garb and his style—sparked off a religious revival. There had been no prophetic word for so long. Multitudes thronged to John at the river Jordan, confessing their sins and being baptised by Him as a sign of their repentance.
To him one day came Jesus of Nazareth. He asked for baptism. His was no confession of sin, for there was no such consciousness in the soul of Jesus. He saw the hand of God in John’s mission, and by sharing in the act of baptism, was making Himself one with the people He had come to help.

And in the experience of baptism something tremen­dous happened to Jesus. Matthew writes, “At that moment heaven opened. He saw the Spirit of God descending and a voice from heaven saying, “‘This is my Son, my Beloved, on Whom my favour rests’.” Eastern imagery has been woven into the story but the experience seems clear. In that moment of dedication, a sense of serenity and peace filled the soul of our Lord. “Heaven opened.” There came with the inner voice that said “My Son,” a confirmation of all that the years in Nazareth had been suggesting to Him. The growing consciousness that He was God’s Son, the conviction that He was in the world to fulfil the saving purpose of God for mankind, all the dreams of His childhood, all the growing con­victions of His young manhood, all these were now wonder­fully confirmed as He stood by the Jordan. For Jesus there was a sense of complete oneness with God, a certainty of power to do the work before Him, a filling of His heart with the very peace of God.

We cannot stress too greatly the importance of this moment in the experience of our Lord. The consciousness was now complete, the conviction was unshakeable, He was ready to begin His work for God. One further point on this question must be made. While we speak of Christ’s unshakeable conviction that He was the Son of God we must not assume that this conviction was in any sense automatically or easily main­tained. In a brief space of time as we shall see, the Tempter was to suggest slyly, “If you are the Son of God.” This conviction of Jesus was not one that could be proved in any outward scientific fashion. It was maintained by His constant identification with the will of God. To suppose anything else is to belittle His true manhood and the reality of His temptation. There is a deep and wonderful sense in which we must say that the consciousness of our Lord’s divinity must have been to the end of His earthly days held fast by faith.

III.          THE PURPOSE OF CHRIST’S MINISTRY
Jesus knew Himself at His baptism to be the Son of God and was convinced that He was in the world to fulfil the purpose of God for the world. What was that purpose and in which way was He to fulfil it?

(a)           Accepting the Will of God
Over against these questions, the words that came to Jesus in the moment of baptism have great importance. “Thou art my Son, the Beloved on whom my favour rests.” The words are quoted from the Old Testament. The reading and study of Scripture had obviously played a major part in leading Jesus to an understanding of who He was, and what He was in the world to do. But they are a combination of two passages of the Old Testament, one from the Psalms, one from the prophecy of Isaiah. The first has reference to the coming of one who was to be Israel’s king and God’s anointed. The application of these words “Thou art my Son” to Jesus was a clear confirmation to Him that He was the fulfilment of this ancient prophecy, the Son of God, the One Promised to establish God’s rule among men.

But the other phrase, “My beloved, on whom my favour rests,” is a quotation from a passage never before associated with the coming Messiah. It is a part of the description of the servant of the Lord who, according to Isaiah 53, was to fulfil his calling by suffering and self-­sacrifice. In His baptism there came to Jesus not only the assurance that He was the Messiah but the culmination of His convictions that He was to be the kind of Messiah no Jew had ever dreamed of, who would fulfil God’s saving purpose for the world through His own suffering and death. We cannot avoid the conclusion that the shadow of the Cross was in our Lord’s mind from the very beginning of His ministry.

Closely associated with this aspect of the Lord’s baptism is the experience of the temptation that followed. Knowing Himself to be the Son of God He must face questions as to how His work in the world was to be done. He realised that extraordinary power was His. How were these powers to be used? What course of action was He to follow to win men back to God?

Read the story of the Temptation in the Wilderness, consider the temptations one by one. They are all suggestions that He should deviate from the path of suffering and sacrifice He knew was God’s will for Him, proposals that He should choose an easier and less costly way.

To turn stones into bread was to use the way of material enrichment for the winning of the hearts of men. But it was not physical needs alone Jesus had come to serve, but the spiritual needs that could not be met by things material. To leap from the summit of the Temple was to adopt the spectacular and overawe men into allegiance. But Jesus would have none of this. A moment’s wonder would pass. He desired an allegiance that was deep and abiding.
To strike a bargain with evil, to compromise with worldly powers was to adopt the methods of force and guile to gain acceptance of His claims. But for Jesus there could be no compromise with anything that was not wholly in agreement with the will of God. There could be no short cuts of this kind to the fulfilling of His mission.
“So,” we read, “the tempter departed—biding his time.”

There are two things to be noted for our purpose.
Jesus in this experience of temptation fought His way through to a complete rejection of any way other than God’s way for His work in the world. To be absolutely true to God’s will for Him, to use love and not force, to listen to the voice of God rather than the voices of men, this was His determination. He knew in His heart that the ancient prophecies of suffering and death would be proved true, the purposes of God could only be fulfilled by His own self-sacrifice.

We may say that from this moment forward, Calvary was inevitable. We read that “the tempter departed—biding his time.” Here is the suggestion, proved true in our Lord’s experience to the last bitter moments on the Cross, that the temptation to doubt His own calling and to swerve from the will of God, came back again to Jesus time after time. His whole ministry was a battle, fought through to glorious victory with utter dedication and forgetfulness of self, to be true to the purposes of God.

(b) Revealing God to Men
We have been stressing in these pages the revelation to the first disciples that God was in Jesus of Nazareth. When we look at our Lord’s ministry among men we realise how important it is to say, not only that Jesus was divine, but that God is Christ-like. To quote Dr. Ramsey, the present Archbishop of Canterbury, “God is Christ-like and in Him is no un-Christ-likeness at all.”

As they lived with Jesus, certainly as they looked back from the Resurrection over their life with Him, the Apostles realised that they had been learning to think about God in new ways. Nor had this happened only through the teaching of Jesus, great and wonderful as that teaching had been. The revelation of God came not through words only, but through the whole life and death of Jesus. He was not simply telling, but rather showing men what God was like. By putting as much of Himself into Jesus as a human life could express, God was making Himself plain to men in the most practical way. Because He was Cod, He revealed God.

Now this is essential to remember in all our thinking about what God is like. We are apt to speculate, to let our own theories run away with us. But for the Christian there must always be the reference to Jesus. Any thoughts we have, any speculation we indulge in, must be con­stantly compared with what we know of Jesus. Thoughts opposed to His mind and spirit must be dismissed. The revelation of God given in Jesus was in some fundamental respects very different from expectation.

It was no wonder that many in His time failed to see God in Jesus, no wonder that it took the Resurrection to confirm the faith even of His closest friends. Men had tended to think of God in terms of His great attributes, to say that He was almighty, eternal, righteous, high and holy, and they were right to stress these. But they saw in Jesus supremely, lowliness, service, self-sacrifice.

There seemed almost contradiction here, If God were to appear to men, would He not come in great majesty, dazzling men by His glory, establishing His rule among men with irresistible power? But Jesus came in great humility, born in a stable, brought up in obscurity. He appeared among men as a man of the people. He gave Himself to the service of men. He healed and He helped and He delivered. He spoke to men but He would not force them to His way.

He submitted Himself to rejection, to insult, at last to shameful death. And His supreme motive all the way through was love, and it was in this essentially that He revealed God. Love was not a passing mood of God, not an occasional break in His majesty, but the very essence of His being. “God is love,” said one of the New Testament writers looking back, and he had learned this from Jesus. There was nothing soft or sentimental in this love, any more than there was in Jesus Himself. Love could be stern and awful and de­manding as men found in Jesus. But always love was supreme.

“Call God, Father,” said Jesus and in the greatest stories ever told He illustrated what He meant, taking the kindliest picture men know and making it only the faintest comparison to what God is like.
His own life and work made the point even more clearly. He sought all and He served all. With no thought of self He gave Himself to the needs of men. Concerned about the multitudes who gathered round Him, He never ceased to think in terms of the individual. Men and women who were considered outside decent society were never shut out of His care. No one was too far away, too far gone, too far down, to know the love of Jesus. His death was to be the supreme proof of His love, for knowing that only the Cross could redeem the world He willingly gave Himself to suffering and death. And in all this men saw God. “Anyone who has seen me, said Jesus in John’s Gospel, “has seen the Father.” Jesus revealed God to men.
(c) Revealing Men to Themselves
It is a fascinating point in the Gospel stories that Christ’s revealing of God to men also made them see themselves as they truly were.
Was the confrontation of men with Jesus always a comforting experience? Far from it. The opposite was most often true. The personality of Jesus seemed to act as a mirror in which men saw themselves as they really were.
Simon Peter by the lakeside of Galilee, standing face to face with Jesus in an incident that made him realise Jesus was at least different from other men, suddenly fell to his knees. “Leave me alone,” he said, “sinner that I am.”

Zacchaeus, the little tax gatherer of Jericho, gazing into the upturned eyes of Jesus found himself pouring out a confession of his thefts and frauds. So it was with men when they came to personal encounter with Jesus. It was as if a veil had been torn from their eyes. Confronted with the strong purity of the incarnate Lord, they saw themselves clearly. And it was never a pretty sight, never a comforting thing for a man to see clearly into his own heart, to see the cheapness of life lived for trivial things, the falsity of self-righteous­ness, the filth of immorality, the shamefulness and empti­ness of the greed for things.

Men’s reactions of course were not always the same. Sometimes, like Peter, a man seeing himself truly was turned to penitence, sometimes like Zacchaeus, he went off to make restitution and to seek a better way. Some­times there was deep sorrow as when the rich young ruler, seeing himself both as he was and as he might be, could not pay the price Jesus demanded and went away in distress. Often there was indignation, an angry refusal to accept the truth they saw, an outcome of hatred and enmity towards Jesus.

The crucial fact was that Jesus, by the sheer power and purity of His incarnate deity, gave a true diagnosis of human need. It was nothing that man himself could deal with. Neither education nor self-improvement, neither tears of shame nor agonies of effort could meet this problem. It was caused fundamentally by estrange­ment from God and only God Himself could provide an answer.

(d) The Task of Reconciliation
In the ministry of Jesus we find this answer being disclosed.
Take Simon Peter as an illustration. We saw him by the lakeside, amazed to find in Jesus Some One greater, higher than he had ever known, stricken in that same moment by a sense of his own sin and unworthiness. But Jesus called Peter to be with Him, And in the months and years that followed, Jesus persistently cared for Peter, never making light of his sinful ways but never letting him go; never concealing what he was but holding up before him always the inspiration of what he could become; ever and always staying with him in love, leading him always nearer to God.

And so we must come at last to the Cross. For there the whole purpose of the Incarnation is made clear. There God’s love and man’s need are shown unmistakably. There the work of reconciliation was accomplished.

IV. THE CRUCIFIED LORD

(a) The Centrality of the Cross
It is from the point of view of the Resurrection that we are looking back over the Gospel records; only there did the Apostles enter into a full understanding of the person and work of Christ. This is certainly true when we think in terms of the Cross. And we must take our stand with them there if we seek the meaning of this tremendous event.

For there is no doubt that the men of the New Testament consider the death of Jesus absolutely central. It is a remarkable fact that the writers of the Gospels spend, what in anything like a normal biography would seem a quite extraordinary space and time, over the last week in the life of Jesus. Two-fifths of the first Gospel, three-fifths of the second, one-third of the third, and almost one-half of the fourth, are given to the Passion Story. But the Gospels are not biographies. They were written, as we have seen, much later than the events they record, not to tabulate these events, but to show their significance. And the death of Jesus is given lengthy and emphatic attention because to the Gospel writers it was the heart of their message.

They show us very clearly what was the mind of the disciples when the Crucifixion took place. They had their personal love for Jesus; how could they think of Him other than with a great affection after living in such close intimacy with Him? That love had become an agony of spirit as they saw Him subjected to the roughest abuse a man could suffer and put to the most cruel death a man could die. But there was much more in their sorrow than a broken human relationship. They had cherished their dreams about Jesus. ‘We had been hoping,” the two on the Emmaeus Road said, “that He was the man to liberate Israel.” In terms of their Jewish faith they had hoped He was the Messiah, the One who would establish God’s rule among men. But their dreams had been shattered by the Crucifixion. The personality, the words, the actions of Jesus, which had made them at times sure that Jesus was the Son of God, had been completely overshadowed by the disaster of Calvary. This was for them the end, and there has been no more despairing group in all the world than the band of disciples on the evening of the first Good Friday.

No wonder then that the Resurrection of Jesus came to these disciples as the most glorious wonder that had ever happened. Jesus was all they had dreamed of and more. Now everything looked different, the whole world looked different, even the Cross looked different. This is the point at which we must pause. Even the Cross looked different. What had seemed to them at the time unrelieved tragedy and ghastly disaster, looked very different now.

The disciples began to learn very soon that the Cross had the central place in the purpose of God. They learned this first from the lips of the Risen Lord Himself. The two on the Emmaeus Road, still unaware of the Resurrec­tion were talking of the Crucifixion in terms of bitter tragedy. “How dull you are, said Jesus, “Don’t you see that the Messiah was bound to suffer thus?” So the Cross had been necessary in the purposes of God. Soon this word was being proclaimed openly by the Apostles. Peter spoke on the Day of Pentecost of the death of Jesus having taken place, “by the deliberate will and plan of God.”

This never was meant to release from their responsibility the men who crucified Jesus. By their own deliberate choice, as the same Peter declared, “Herod and Pontius Pilate conspired with the heathen and with the people of Israel to do these things.” The cruelty of men’s free choice and the saving purpose of God, met together at the Cross. Nor did this new understanding of the Cross come to the disciples only by the teaching of their Risen Master. They found it confirmed and sealed by the Holy Spirit in their own experience. They had discovered a sense of peace with God that was bound up with what had happened at the Cross. They knew themselves forgiven because Jesus had died. The Cross became the centre of their thoughts and the theme of their preaching as the whole New Testament makes clear.

And this has been the experience of men in every age. Forgiveness, peace with God, power to live new lives, all this and so much more has come to men who have learned to put their trust in Christ Crucified. “In the Cross of Christ I glory”—this has been the constant expression of the Church’s faith. So the meaning of the Cross came home first to the experience of men, but when they went out into the world to preach the Gospel they had to try to interpret the Cross to men’s understanding. They had to try to explain how it was that through the Cross God had dealt finally and completely with the need of the world.

 

(b) The Human Predicament
We cannot begin to understand the significance of the Cross nor indeed the whole mission of our Lord until we have some inkling of the depth of human need.
God made men, the Bible declares, in His own image, which means this at least, that they were meant to live in personal relationship with their Creator. We have seen this relationship revealed in Jesus. He was what all men were meant to be, He lived in the kind of personal intimacy with God which all men were meant to know. But men have never realised this true relationship, for without exception, they have taken their own way rather than God’s. Instead of dependence upon God, they have chosen to rely upon themselves. So the relationship has been broken and men have been estranged from God. This refusal to maintain right relations with God the Bible calls sin, and we must see the reality and tragedy of sin if we are to appreciate the value of the Incarnation and the Cross.

Two things must be clear about the reality of sin. Sin is more than the sum of the faults we commit. It is more than separate acts, it is a state of being. This is very clear from our own experience. We try to cope with particular faults but others spring up in their place. We rebound from one particular type of fault to others of a different type, from vanity to self-accusing, from indulgence to discipline, from carelessness to over-anxiety. We are driven to see that sin is not so much what we do as what we are. Behind the actions there is a state, a source from which these separate faults proceed. And it is this source, this state of sinfulness which must be dealt with, this perversity in our nature which must be put right.

Again, sin is not to be thought of as an individual matter between a man and his God. The Bible talks about all men having sinned, about the whole world lying in wickedness. Theologians have talked about original sin. They are in agreement that we are all bound up together, affecting one another and being affected by the society we have built up. Sinfulness is something we are born with, it has become part of our human nature. Even the world in which we live, the Bible suggests, has come to share man’s disorder. This is not a theory. The Bible is not concerned to ask how or when this all came about. It is concerned, with a tremendous realism, to stress the tragic situation in which men are found.

(c) What this means from man’s point of view
As we have just seen, sin is a universal thing. There is no man free of the taint of it. This does not mean that every man would admit this to be true. The consequences of sin in his life he may well blame on other things. He may seek to find a remedy for them in a whole variety of sources. But the fact is there. Man’s sinfulness is a universal thing. It has consequences in a man’s own life. Some of the greatest literary works in the world illustrate this with a realism almost as grim as that of the Bible itself. The judgment that follows greed or ambition, or jealousy; the spiritual bondage to which a man can bring himself by repeated acts of sin, the corruption of character which inevitably results.

Sin has consequences in a man’s dealings with his fellows. The disorders of society, the strife of nation, and colour and class, poverty and crime and so much more, are direct results of the impact of sin. But because sin means estrangement from God, its worst effects are on a man’s relationship with God. The intimacy God intended has become alienation. The family link by which men were meant to live as God’s children has been shattered. Man feels himself lost in a world in which he was meant to feel at home.

Worst of all he becomes blind to God. Sin may lead him to deny the very reality of the God who made him, Or if the image of God dwells in his mind it is a blurred image. He thinks of God in unworthy ways, as it were, creating God in his own image. He pictures Him as a far-off Original Source, indifferent to the needs of men. Or he thinks of Him as a tyrant, waiting to pounce in judgment, needing to be appeased. So there has been the long story of man’s fumbling attempts to understand God.

Perhaps the most pathetic result of man’s sin is that he is totally unable to deal with the problem himself. And this precisely because the root of it is estrangement from God. If it were only a fault in himself or a mistake in the structures of his society, he might be able to do something about it. But because his situation has been brought about by rebellion against God, the gulf created is one that no one can bridge. The most tragic feature about man’s position is that he can do nothing to put it right.

(d) What this means from God’s point of view
Let us look at this broken relationship from God’s side.
The wrath of God is the term the Bible uses to describe God’s reaction to sin. Interpreted literally, in terms of human reference, it has caused misunderstanding. We are not to think of God as subject to human moods, annoyed or made angry. Rather are we to think of the wrath of God as the inevitable reaction of holiness to sinfulness, as the inability of the all-righteous God to accept evil. It must be part of the character of God to have this reaction to sin. if we have ever known in ourselves a sense of shocked revulsion, then it is not perhaps altogether impossible for us to imagine in an infinitely small degree how God must react to human sin.

Because God is eternal this reaction, this wrath, must have eternal consequences. Jesus Himself made this point frequently and strongly, and the writers of the New Testament emphasised it too. Apart from the mercy of God the estrangement sin has made must mean a total and eternal separation; man’s high destiny brought by his rebellion to tragic disaster. We must, as best we can, understand the grim truth about the human predicament. Only so can we begin to realise the full wonder of God’s purpose in Christ.

(e) I But why the Incarnation and the Cross?
No doubt someone will ask at this point, “But why should the mission of Christ have been necessary at all, and in particular, why had the Cross to be involved? If God loves us, why didn’t He just forgive us—as simply as that? Why should all the rest be necessary?”
The simple answer must be that true forgiveness is always a costly thing and divine forgiveness so infinitely costly that it could only be expressed in terms of the Cross.

If a man is grievously wronged by a friend whom he has loved and trusted, then he may forgive him. But that forgiveness will not be an easy good-natured in­dulgence. If there is true friendship and deep love, then forgiveness will be a sore and costly experience. There will be a sense of shame to be shared, an anguish into which both must enter. It is only out of that costly experience that true forgiveness will come.
How much more true all this must be of God, not only because His understanding of our sin is so much more complete, but because His forgiveness is so much more deep and true than ours could ever be. If the broken relationship is to be restored, if men’s sinfulness is to be pardoned and himself put right, then we must expect the task to be a painful and costly one.

(f) God’s mighty act in Christ
And so we come to the Cross, the meeting point of God and man.
We must keep absolutely clear in our minds the fact that it is God who acts in the whole great work of Incarna­tion and Atonement. To talk as we do of God sending His Son is not to be taken as suggesting any division of purpose or attitude within the Trinity. Certainly we must never caricature the truth by picturing a loving Son winning men’s forgiveness from a reluctant Father, or dying to appease the anger of a stern Judge. The New Testament writers are absolutely clear in this. It is God Who was in Christ all the way through. “Christ died for us,” writes Paul, “and that is God’s own proof of His love toward us.”

We shall never begin to understand the meaning of the Cross if we try to separate Father from Son. It is from the love and mercy of the Triune God that the whole purpose of reconciliation comes. Nor must we make too great a separation between the life and death of our Lord. We have spoken of the Passion of Jesus as the central point of His mission, and this is so, but it is the Passion of Jesus. To suggest that the life of Jesus has no importance is surely wrong. It would offer us a puppet figure instead of the real Man of Galilee. The sacrifice of Christ on Calvary was the culmination of a sacrifice that began when the Son of God was willing to accept our humanity. And the perfect obedience that gave Christ’s sacrifice its moral worth had been learned in Nazareth and Galilee. So when we speak about the death of Jesus, it is not one or other that we must stress. but both equally, the death—of Jesus.

(g) The Significance of the Cross
Two things, among a whole multitude, must be emphasised when we come to think directly about the meaning of the Cross. First of all there is Revelation, God is revealed to us in the Cross of Christ as in no other way. And it is supremely God’s love that is revealed. Now there is nothing soft or sentimental about that love, Because it is God’s love, it is a holy love, revealing sin in its true black horrible reality, not to be treated lightly, taking the Cross to deal with it.

But love is the last word and the greatest word ex­pressed on Calvary. A love was revealed there that would not be quenched, not by abuse or rejection, not by the thorns or the nails, not by all the physical or mental torment of the worst men could do. Jesus, God in Christ, suffered all of this, and His reaction was to go on loving. God has revealed Himself in other ways and places and times, but the supreme unveiling of the heart of God was made at Calvary. There the holy love of God is for ever made plain.

Was this love of God for the world only true in the period of Christ’s suffering and death? Of course not. So the Cross is the revelation in time of what is true eternally. This is the very nature of God and His un­changing attitude to men. The illustration from a volcano has been often used but is useful to keep in mind. A volcanic eruption occurs once in a long while, stirring the imagination, catching the attention of all who see the tongues of flame, and the molten lava, and hear the roar of mountains split apart, and feel the earth bursting beneath their feet, it is the unforgettable experience of a few brief hours. But it is also a reminder that beneath the earth’s surface there are great fires that have been burning since the world began.

The Cross was a revelation made in short space and time of what God is like eternally. The love men see there is an unchanging and unchangeable fact for ever.
But there is more than revelation at the Cross. There is Reconciliation too.
If indeed we were to argue that the Cross was only revelation of what God is like, it might be argued that the whole immense agony had been in vain.

If a young man, to prove his love for the girl of his choice, throws himself into the water and dies before her eves, his act would be seen as one of folly and not of true love. But if she had first been in danger of drowning, and the young man plunged in to effect her rescue at the cost of his own life, then his action would be considered love of the very highest order. Love reveals itself truly not in exhibition but in serving a true purpose.

So we must ask what was the purpose of God on the Cross? What was Jesus accomplishing by His suffering and death? The New Testament answers—the work of reconciliation. This, as we have seen, is the unanimous testimony based on experience of the first Apostles. They looked back from the Resurrection, united in com­mon allegiance to Christ that was based in a great sense of indebtedness. ‘We are reconciled to God,” they said, “because Jesus died.” . ‘We are new men,” they declared, ‘forgiven, renewed, empowered, filled with the hope of Heaven, for Jesus by His Cross has reconciled us to God.”

And this experience and this testimony have been shared by Christian men in every age. Something happened at the Cross, some mighty act was accomplished there by Christ, which has the power to bring reconciliation and peace, new life and hope, to all whose faith is in Jesus. It is when we ask how the death of Christ affected our reconciliation with God, that we enter upon real difficulty. Christians know that it happened, but not how it happened. Indeed, since we are speaking now of infinite and eternal things, it is no wonder that the mind of men cannot understand, nor the tongue of men express. We can only use pictures and metaphors and illustrations; the New Testament itself uses these, and of course they always fall short in some respects.

Indeed we must be on our guard against insisting too much on any one interpretation of the work of Jesus on the Cross, however clear or helpful that interpretation may seem to us. Sincere men across the years have become involved in bitter controversy because they have insisted too narrowly on their own understanding of the Cross, or rejected too harshly the thoughts of others.

It was natural that the first Christians, being Jews, knowing the Old Testament, understanding the ritual and worship of Judaism, should see the Cross of Jesus in terms of sacrifice. The relationship between God and His people Israel, severed by breaches of the Law, was constantly restored through the sacrificial system. The sincere penitence of the worshipper and the sacrifice of an accepted animal brought the renewed sense of peace with God. The first Christians saw in Jesus the fulfilment of all the Old Testament sacrifices. He, innocent and unblemished, had become the sin-bearer of the world. Our Lord Himself used this metaphor as He spoke of His passion and His death. In the very moment of baptism it was in terms of Isaiah, 53, He saw His task—”a lamb to the slaughter,” “wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities.” He accepted the title John gave Him— “The lamb of God bearing away the sin of the world.”

The writer of the letter to the Hebrews developed this idea as the very basis of his message. “It was not,” he declared, “the blood of sheep or oxen Christ offered, but His own blood, And not in repeated ceremonies, but once and for all.” There is something deep and moving in this picture of Jesus as the sacrifice for sin, that will always make appeal to the human heart.

Paul in his letters made great use of metaphors drawn from the society in which he lived. He goes to the law courts. He sees men as under sentence of death, condemned by the just judgment of God. But Jesus bears the penalty in their place and they go free. He lives in a slave-owning society. He pictures men as slaves to sin. But Christ redeems them, ransoms them from bondage and the price is His own life. In family life he finds a picture of Christ’s work on the Cross. Men by their sin have been alienated from the family of God, but Jesus reconciles men to God by His death. From the field of battle there was still another meta­phor. In His Incarnation Jesus Christ has challenged the power of evil that hold empire over the souls of men and by His Cross and Resurrection has destroyed their tyranny for ever. In the same way as the great Apostle, Christian thinkers in every age have taken New Testament meta­phors and extended them, or used different conceptions of their own.
Thus in the Middle Ages, under the influence of the society of the time, men developed the ransom idea. Like soldiers captured in medieval battles and held prisoner till ransom money was paid, so Christ paid ransom in His Cross, Or a new idea was used, like that of satisfac­tion, a familiar thought to Christendom in the Middle Ages.

Against the background of chivalry, men were taught to think of God’s honour as injured by man s rebellion, and the satisfaction to redeem that honour is being provided by the sacrifice of Jesus.
In Reformation times with emphasis once more on law, legal metaphors were used to interpret the work of Christ, condemnation, punishment, substitution, these were the terms in the thinking of the period.
And the work of interpretation goes on in our own times, men seeking to express the truth of the atonement in words and concepts that are contemporary.

There is thus a wide variety of teaching about Christ’s mighty act on the Cross, both in the New Testament and in the thinking of the Christian Church since then. We are not to suppose that these writers are in conflict with one another. The truth is, the majesty of the Cross cannot be expressed through one metaphor or interpreta­tion. Men try to explain what Christ has done on the Cross as the meaning has come home to their own thought and experience. They are not denying the truth in other interpretations. They are emphasising indeed the many-sided magnificence of the Atonement and the sheer impossibility of the human mind ever being able to understand or explain it fully.

What is most impressive is the way in which men of the New Testament, with all their differences of approach, are completely united in this great fundamental truth, that Christ died for our sins. As sinful men we were estranged from God; Christ by His death accom­plished reconciliation—for us. Because of our estrange­ment we were subject to the wrath of God; Christ in His Cross absorbed that wrath—for us. Sin meant enslave­ment and blindness and death for our spirits. Christ by His sacrifice has brought release and new life and hope-­for us.
The New Testament writers fumble for words, our minds are baffled as we try to grasp the mighty act Christ did for us on His Cross. We must come back at last to the moving simplicity of the greatest of the Apostles, “He loved me, and gave Himself for me.”

(h) Our Response to the Cross